Having a Change of Heart March 3, 2008 12:39 PM Subscribe
There ought to be a way to undo the "(remove from activity)" button on the Recent Activity page, since commenting anew doesn't do it.
There is if you use Linux.
posted by [@I][:+:][@I] at 12:56 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by [@I][:+:][@I] at 12:56 PM on March 3, 2008
At least add (This cannot be undone!) to the little popup dealy.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:06 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Sys Rq at 1:06 PM on March 3, 2008
If you favorite the post, it'll start showing up, Recent Activity-like, in that new My Favorites tab that Matt and pb added to the activity pages.
And is there a more nuanced and romantic use of a favorite than one that says, "at first, I was attracted to you, and wanted to be around you always, to talk with you; but then you grew cold, and I lost interest. I cut you out of my life; I thought it was over for good. But I was wrong baby. I miss you. I love you. I'm sorry, baby, and I want you back and I don't care if I have to click on a different tab to prove it to you. You're worth it."?
The answer is no. No, there is not.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:14 PM on March 3, 2008 [2 favorites]
And is there a more nuanced and romantic use of a favorite than one that says, "at first, I was attracted to you, and wanted to be around you always, to talk with you; but then you grew cold, and I lost interest. I cut you out of my life; I thought it was over for good. But I was wrong baby. I miss you. I love you. I'm sorry, baby, and I want you back and I don't care if I have to click on a different tab to prove it to you. You're worth it."?
The answer is no. No, there is not.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:14 PM on March 3, 2008 [2 favorites]
(That said, it's on my private pony list too, but the My Faves thing above was the solution Matt went with ultimately when considering the possibilities, and it seems to work pretty well for most of the folks who were asking for something like that, so hey!)
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:15 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:15 PM on March 3, 2008
So... does this mean remove from activity actually adds a row to a table of threads you won't see, rather than removes a row from a table of threads you do? That's sort of interesting (well, interesting to me).
posted by Artw at 2:00 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Artw at 2:00 PM on March 3, 2008
Wouldn't it be awesome if they were just collapsable?
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 2:02 PM on March 3, 2008 [5 favorites]
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 2:02 PM on March 3, 2008 [5 favorites]
So... does this mean remove from activity actually adds a row to a table of threads you won't see, rather than removes a row from a table of threads you do?
Yup. The threads that do get displayed in Recent Activity are based on a query of where you've been active lately, and then get trimmed according to that list of exclusions. It means we maintain a small list of threads for an very small subset of mefites; whereas if we kept a list of recently-commented-in threads for every single mefite, we'd be storing and updating a huge amount of data regardless of whether most of those users even bothered with Recent Activity.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:15 PM on March 3, 2008
Yup. The threads that do get displayed in Recent Activity are based on a query of where you've been active lately, and then get trimmed according to that list of exclusions. It means we maintain a small list of threads for an very small subset of mefites; whereas if we kept a list of recently-commented-in threads for every single mefite, we'd be storing and updating a huge amount of data regardless of whether most of those users even bothered with Recent Activity.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:15 PM on March 3, 2008
Maybe I'm not understanding the intricacies of database data editing, but if the "remove from activity" link adds a number to a list, why is it not possible to have another link that removes the number from that list?
posted by Dave Faris at 3:39 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Dave Faris at 3:39 PM on March 3, 2008
You're understanding fine, I think. There's kind of two separate features here:
1. "Unremove from activity"
2. "Add to activity"
It's a smaller pony, (1): we could probably solve it by having a small box at the top of RA listing all active-but-ignored threads with a little checkmark or something to click to unremove them. Whether or not Matt and pb want to bother with adding that is another question; plying them with good booze might help, but the take when we set up the remove link in the first place was that the need to unremove would be outlier enough that, eh. Anyone who got repeatedly burned by that could probably learn to be a little more cautious about what they decided to remove from activity.
With (2), we're talking about somehow tweaking the main thread-view interface to add an "add to activity" widget to every post, which is something I know for sure Matt is disinclined to do, mainly because it'd add complexity (what is this thing and what is it for and how do I use it, asks every non-rabid mefite) and interface clutter (whether as a big text string [e.g. "add to activity"] or as a little character [e.g. "%" or whatever]).
The addition of the My Favorites feature was a compromise allowing people to do effectively this: to add threads to a RA-style view without having to comment in threads gratuitously (yay!) and without requiring an additional widget (and explanatory info somehow) to the thread view of every post.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:07 PM on March 3, 2008
1. "Unremove from activity"
2. "Add to activity"
It's a smaller pony, (1): we could probably solve it by having a small box at the top of RA listing all active-but-ignored threads with a little checkmark or something to click to unremove them. Whether or not Matt and pb want to bother with adding that is another question; plying them with good booze might help, but the take when we set up the remove link in the first place was that the need to unremove would be outlier enough that, eh. Anyone who got repeatedly burned by that could probably learn to be a little more cautious about what they decided to remove from activity.
With (2), we're talking about somehow tweaking the main thread-view interface to add an "add to activity" widget to every post, which is something I know for sure Matt is disinclined to do, mainly because it'd add complexity (what is this thing and what is it for and how do I use it, asks every non-rabid mefite) and interface clutter (whether as a big text string [e.g. "add to activity"] or as a little character [e.g. "%" or whatever]).
The addition of the My Favorites feature was a compromise allowing people to do effectively this: to add threads to a RA-style view without having to comment in threads gratuitously (yay!) and without requiring an additional widget (and explanatory info somehow) to the thread view of every post.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:07 PM on March 3, 2008
I like the idea of adding a new comment erasing the "remove from activity" flag, and it would probably be trivial to code that, but real life coding isn't always so easy. If it is easy, I would like that and would be more willing to then use the original feature.
posted by caddis at 4:29 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by caddis at 4:29 PM on March 3, 2008
The hard part of this Dave is the interface. I like the idea of collapsing questions and still showing them, but given the current UI where stuff removed gets hidden completely, how would we add an indicator and easy undo to something like that?
Show a line at the bottom that says ...and 4 hidden threads and you can click that to see/unhide them? Maybe we should just do a collapse/expand thing for threads instead of completely hiding them.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:43 PM on March 3, 2008
Show a line at the bottom that says ...and 4 hidden threads and you can click that to see/unhide them? Maybe we should just do a collapse/expand thing for threads instead of completely hiding them.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:43 PM on March 3, 2008
Now that's what I'm talking about.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 4:58 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 4:58 PM on March 3, 2008
Don't shoot me for mentioning this evil social networking site, but in terms of collapsible threads I'd envision something along the lines of what Facebook offers for your homepage. You can click the little arrow that collapses, say, someone's "Wall" and all you'll see henceforth on every page is a little blue bar that says "Wall". Until of course you choose to un-collapse it, at which point you get full access to the information again. Am I making sense?
posted by Phire at 5:12 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Phire at 5:12 PM on March 3, 2008
"The hard part of this Dave is the interface. I like the idea of collapsing questions and still showing them, but given the current UI where stuff removed gets hidden completely, how would we add an indicator and easy undo to something like that?"
In the thread itself, add something similar to the unfavorite feature. When you load the thread, show some text that says: "This post is currently hidden on your Recent Activity page. Unhide?"
posted by Eideteker at 6:03 PM on March 3, 2008
In the thread itself, add something similar to the unfavorite feature. When you load the thread, show some text that says: "This post is currently hidden on your Recent Activity page. Unhide?"
posted by Eideteker at 6:03 PM on March 3, 2008
Yeah, I was gonna suggest the same thing as Eideteker ... just show the title of the removed thread and give us an option to unhide it. Short of that, give us no UI at all. If I remove a thread from my recent activity, but then I go ahead and post a new reply, assume I've changed my mind, and use the post process to remove the thread from the list of hidden threads.
posted by Dave Faris at 6:08 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Dave Faris at 6:08 PM on March 3, 2008
I think things are basically fine as is, but if it's not too ponyish to remove any pre existing row for the thread in a block table when a comment is made it would seem like a nice, invisible solution (though of course probably a lot of things go on when a comment is made and I can see an argument for not adding too many new things there). People who really don't want to see a thread could just hide it again, though I guess repeated hiders and commenters might not like that (but why would they be doing that in the first place? Ah, edge cases...)
posted by Artw at 6:10 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Artw at 6:10 PM on March 3, 2008
Huh. I have a greasemonkey script that allows me to minimize and maximize threads in my recent activity. It works really well and I enjoy using it. I was just going to link to it here for you, but now I can't find it on userscripts. Am I really bad at searching, or did someone take it down?
posted by mosessis at 9:38 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by mosessis at 9:38 PM on March 3, 2008
Related: is there a reason FPPs do not appear in Recent Activity? Just comments?
posted by Tehanu at 9:54 PM on March 3, 2008
posted by Tehanu at 9:54 PM on March 3, 2008
I'd kind of like the FPPs in recent activity pony too. I kind of assume that the data structures involved are completely different though.
posted by Artw at 8:29 AM on March 4, 2008
posted by Artw at 8:29 AM on March 4, 2008
Tehanu: "Related: is there a reason FPPs do not appear in Recent Activity? Just comments?"
The recent activity just defaults to the "My Comments" tab. There's a different tab there for My (i.e., Your) Posts.
posted by Plutor at 11:51 AM on March 4, 2008
The recent activity just defaults to the "My Comments" tab. There's a different tab there for My (i.e., Your) Posts.
posted by Plutor at 11:51 AM on March 4, 2008
Restoring posts in RA is go. If you've removed any posts recently that you want to restore, scroll to the bottom of the My Comments tab. If any posts you've removed have recent activity, you should see a note like this:
"Note: You have removed at least x posts with recent activity."
Click on the number, and you'll get to the "My Removed Posts" page with a list of those removed posts. Click "restore", head back to My Comments, and the post should be restored.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:04 AM on March 5, 2008 [1 favorite]
"Note: You have removed at least x posts with recent activity."
Click on the number, and you'll get to the "My Removed Posts" page with a list of those removed posts. Click "restore", head back to My Comments, and the post should be restored.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:04 AM on March 5, 2008 [1 favorite]
Thanks pb.
posted by Dave Faris at 10:16 AM on March 5, 2008
posted by Dave Faris at 10:16 AM on March 5, 2008
The recent activity just defaults to the "My Comments" tab. There's a different tab there for My (i.e., Your) Posts.
Oops. Thanks for pointing that out, and the new pony.
posted by Tehanu at 11:45 AM on March 5, 2008
Oops. Thanks for pointing that out, and the new pony.
posted by Tehanu at 11:45 AM on March 5, 2008
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posted by dersins at 12:47 PM on March 3, 2008